After Labour’s general election victory there was one fact of which Keir Starmer was particularly proud. “We have a majority in England, in Scotland and in Wales,” he declared, the first time any party had achieved this feat since 2001.
Scottish Labour, a force routinely declared dead, had won 37 seats, reducing the SNP to just nine, and Anas Sarwar was predicted to become the next first minister. Yet even then, wise heads in Labour spoke not of a humiliating defeat for nationalism but of “one last chance” for the Union. They would soon be vindicated.
For Scottish Labour, Starmer’s record unpopularity – one poll found Donald Trump was more popular in the country – has proved lethal. Having led the SNP before the general election it now trails by a double-digit margin, prompting some MPs to privately call for Starmer’s departure before May. A fifth consecutive victory for John Swinney’s party, a result almost unheard of in a democratic system, is not just possible but likely.
This is the backdrop to the telling speech Sarwar gave yesterday as he launched Scottish Labour’s campaign. Standing in front of a vast Saltire, with no party branding visible, he declared: “I know the Prime Minister and the UK Labour government are not popular with the public right now. So, I am not running to be Scotland’s first minister in denial of that truth. I am running to be Scotland’s first minister in defiance of it”. When pressed on whether he wanted Starmer to campaign in Scotland, Sarwar replied: “I would say the best thing that Keir Starmer and the UK Labour government can do is be behind their doors and in their departments getting things right and changing our outcomes”.
Scottish Labour says that no formal request for Starmer to stay away from the campaign trail has been made, but the party is intent on pursuing a strategy of differentiation. Aides point to Sarwar’s public criticism of winter fuel payment cuts, the two-child benefit cap and Gaza policy as areas where he was unafraid to break with Westminster – and was ultimately vindicated. “You have to put your country before your party and that’s the metric we will apply to all of the decisions we make,” says a senior source, adapting Starmer’s mantra of choice.
There are two factors that give party strategists hope. The first is the SNP’s dismal record on public services with 618,477 people (or one in nine Scots) on NHS waiting lists. As Sarwar noted: “There are more people, in my home city of Glasgow alone, waiting more than two years for a hospital appointment than the whole of England combined”.
The SNP’s current lead doesn’t reflect any great love for the party – it is currently polling in the mid-30s, far down from the 47.7 per cent of the vote it won at the last election in 2021. Rather it reflects a unionist vote now fractured across four parties: Labour, Reform, the Tories and the Lib Dems. As the threat of another SNP victory concentrates minds, Sarwar hopes that he will attract tactical support from anti-independence voters.
Yet in the absence of a late recovery, Scottish Labour will be left to rue a defeat that many will contend was avoidable. Starmer, for his own part, has emphasised that the elections are “not a referendum on the Westminster government”. But if the SNP emerges triumphant on 7 May, there is no doubt where Labour MPs will place the blame.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: America’s imperial fights are not necessarily ours]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment